As much as I try to act as a sober-minded, fact-based (though never poker-faced!) narrator of these tumultuous political times, there are occasions — more frequent than I’m willing to let on — that I feel like a desperate soothsayer wildly scanning tea leaves and watching for symbolic birds to clue me in to the deeper ways of the world. I’ve got this sensation this morning as I consider a couple political stories that share a common theme: unexpected areas of bipartisan agreement and positively shifting public sentiment on a pair of pressing issues.
The first: at New Republic, Matt Stoller writes about an emerging cross-party movement to reign in monopolies like Amazon. I will up and confess to being somewhat shocked to learn that some prominent GOP politicians have been signaling interest in the anti-monopoly effort. And while it’s true that Democratic politicians and liberal think tanks are the drivers on this issue, the fact that there are limits to what some Republicans are willing to accept in terms of corporate power screwing up the economy suggests in turn that possibilities for reform may not be as distant as I would have thought. I like to argue for having faith in the ability to change people’s minds, but this hasn’t stopped me from tending to believe that the GOP is basically unreformable at this point. That’s still my inclination, but it may be that there are some issues — like monopolies — that are so obviously inimical to a healthy economy (not to mention challenging to politicians’ non-monopolistic donors) that some otherwise cautious politicians become willing to take a stand.
The second article that’s got me wondering whether I’m too eager to read big messages in small signs, or just becoming more open to grounds for cautious optimism: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild, author of the must-read Strangers in Their Own Land, has an essay (co-written with her son, a member of the California Energy Commission) arguing that Republican voters may be more open to action to fight climate change than has generally been understood. As with those Republicans beginning to doubt the wisdom of monopolies, the simple fact of shifting opinions on this subject is in itself remarkable. I doubt I’m alone in having gradually concluded that GOP opinion on climate change would never alter, and that any solutions going forward would have to be pushed solely by the Democrats, which in turn has cultivated a certain pessimism in light of what a heavy political lift this would be.
The Hochschilds raise a seemingly simple point that has profound implications for how to move forward not only the climate debate, but also the fight against monopolies and other issues where there is broader agreement than previously thought: members of both major parties are heavily influenced by the sources through which they receive information. They point out that “Many conservative Republicans feel that frightening news of climate change usually comes from alarmist liberals who belittle their religious faith, elitists who condescend to them and a federal government that, until Mr. Trump, had forgotten them.” But they see possibilities in what might happen were more Republicans, or otherwise trusted sources, to deliver such information:
A talk by an evangelical climate scientist, one study shows, altered the views of climate skeptics studying at evangelical colleges. Similarly, we need to find ways of showing science-doubting Republican oil workers that the leaders of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP have acknowledged the risk of climate change and that steps must be taken to address it. Republicans who greatly admire the military could learn about the ways the Pentagon has already acknowledged the risk of climate change as a security issue and has quietly set about installing renewable energy projects on bases across the country.
Two other points also caught my eye: on climate change, there’s a discernible split between the attitudes of more and less conservative Republican voters, and between the attitudes of voters and elected officials. Together with the observation about which information sources Republican voters trust, these data points suggest that part of the fight against climate change should involve those on the left figuring out how to reach persuadable voters on the right.
This has come up before in my broader arguments about how best to protect democracy in the United States, and it comes up again in discussions of reining in monopoly and climate change: the initiative on these issues is necessarily from the the left side of the political spectrum, which prioritizes these issues far more than the right. At the same time, though, the fact that something as basic to our universal survival as environmental protection could be claimed as a liberal issue speaks as much to the pathologies of American conservatism as it does to some immutable description of what constitutes a right versus left issue. Not for the first time (and here I feel the lure of the soothsayer), I have the sense that policies of great universal appeal have somehow been pigeonholed as belonging to “the left” rather than, say, “all Americans who need to breathe air to survive.” Will actual conservatism, and not this radical urge to despoil our nation and planet, manage to make a comeback in the GOP?